(Newser)
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Members of a book club out for a ride through California wine country say they endured a "humiliating" experience Saturday when they were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The women from the Sistahs on the Reading Edge club—10 of them black, one white, per the Napa Valley Register—say they were racially targeted for laughing and talking too loud. "It was humiliating," Lisa Johnson tells the Chronicle. "I'm really offended. ... I felt like it was a racist attack on us." Johnson, who posted photos on Facebook, says members of her group, all seated adjacent to each other on the 18-mile ride, may have been "rambunctious," but they weren't "obnoxious or intoxicated." In fact, she notes, several passengers befriended them—except for one woman pointed out in one of her Facebook photos, who reportedly told the group "this isn't a bar."

"No one told us of any noise ordinance," Johnson tells the Register. "If you get a group of 11 women talking and laughing, it's going to be loud." A Napa Valley Wine Train rep said in a statement that staff "received complaints from several parties in the same car and after three attempts from staff, requesting that the group keep the noise to an acceptable level, they were removed from the train and offered transportation back to the station in Napa," per the Chronicle. The #LaughingWhileBlack hashtag has emerged on Twitter to support the women, while a Yelp reviewer who says she witnessed the women being escorted off says, "I'd like to believe it wasn't a racially motivated act, but given the fact that other, non-black guests were behaving in the same way and not removed, I can only conclude that it was discrimination. This business belongs in the 'what is wrong with our country' category."

Everyone but 12 people had an enjoyable excursion on the Napa wine train? Un-newsworthy this. Move along, nothing to see here.

markdis

Aug 24, 2015 11:35 PM CDT

Well there's another way to look at this, that they did rely on race to make the decision to kick the women off the train and as soon as it is pointed out, then it's countered that they are playing the race card. But I would beg to differ. If they relied on the women's race, then it was they who played the race card and the women just pointed it out. Pointing out that they were kicked off the train because of their race, is not playing the race card. It's who kicked off the train because they are black that played the race card.